Married, and twice a father of short-lived children, he was called upon for prudent consideration by the necessities of his position and the prudential suggestions of his wife.
She hated the stage although she loved the actor. Notwithstanding
Mr. Owenson’s brilliant success in
Sheridan’s Sir Lucius O’Trigger, and Cumberland’s Major
O’Flaherty, in both which he had been the substitute of Mr. Hirst and Mr.
Mudie, who knew as much of Ireland as they did of New Zealand. Their English
audiences, however, be it said, were satisfied, for they had not yet got beyond the
conventional delineation of Teague and Father
Foigarde, types of Irish savagery and Catholic Jesuitism.
Cumberland and Sheridan both thanked my
father for redeeming their creations from caricature; but in spite of their encomiums, he
compromised with my mother’s prejudices, and for the nonce gave up the stage for the
church; that is, he became one of the best and most
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Sacred music was just then the rage throughout England, especially in London, which had only a few years before slowly awakened to the merits of Handel, owing to the success of his “Messiah” in Dublin.
There were few cathedrals to which my father was not summoned when oratorios were celebrated. Sacred music was not then celebrated only in cathedrals, but in theatres, concert halls, and music rooms.
The pupil of Arne and Worgan, whose science was assisted by the noblest voice, obtained all the success he desired, and a good income, which he enjoyed in the best company, which favourable circumstances had procured for him. My mother was satisfied—but my father was not, for he wanted to return to the stage—“’tis my vocation, Hal!”
After a few years residence in England, an accident occurred which restored him for ever to the profession he liked and the country he loved.
Through the medium of his theatrical friends he had access to the green-rooms of all the metropolitan theatres, and he did not let his privilege lie idle, though he found there the charms which Johnson declared he had found it so difficult to resist.
Ireland had for the last half-century lent to the English drama, not only her best writers, but her best actors, and occasionally borrowed them back for her own theatres.
The patentee of the Theatre Royal, Crow Street,
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Mr. Daly had happened to be behind the scenes on the night when my father had been playing Major O’Flaherty, and had heard Mr. Cumberland say, shaking him by the hand, “Mr. Owenson, I am the first author who has brought an Irish gentleman on the stage, and you are the first whoever played it like a gentleman.”*
Daly, who became a constant visitor at my father’s house when in town, made him an offer to become a small shareholder in the Theatre Royal, Dublin, and deputy-manager; with the right of acting any characters he chose, in his own répertoire; Don Carlos, in the Duenna, and Careless, in the School for Scandal were added; the chief merit of both these parts being the songs, which he sang in perfection.
Mr. Daly had taken it into his head that my father
* One evening, at the Countess of Charleville’s, the celebrated Mrs. Abingdon, talking to me when I was playing my own character of the Wild Irish Girl, inquired affectionately after my father, saying, “Of all the managers I ever had to deal with he was the most of a gentleman. I was present when Mr. Cumberland paid him the pretty compliment on his playing Major O’Flaherty.” |
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Of all this transaction my poor dear mother knew nothing till the articles were signed and sealed; but with a promise that she should return to England the moment she found Ireland unpleasant, my father found the means to reconcile her to his own views. Ah! l’éloquence du mari! it is worth all the logic in the world.
On her arrival in Ireland, my mother did her best to make her penal settlement supportable. My father took a pretty villa for her at Drumcondra, a lovely village, well known to the Stellas and Delaneys, the Monte Pincio of the Dublin dramatists and artists of the day.
My mother brought over with her an old Welsh servant maid; like herself, a disciple of Lady Huntingdon; a great comfort to her in her banishment to the land of potatoes and papists, both of which she hated with Christian inveteracy and culinary prejudice.
She wrote to an English friend, the wife of a Wesleyan minister, who had opened “a little concern of his own,” at Portarlington, the asylum of Protestant refugees from France, to procure for her a maid to be about her own person, a pretorian guard in that land of idolatry.
My mother’s friend sent her, in reply to her appeal, one of the
children’s maids from the great Huguenot school in Ireland, the well known Madame Terson,
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This passed into a sobriquet which degenerated into “Molly Atkinson.” She was also called “French Molly,” on the strength of a few words of bad French and an affectation of broken English. Servants in Ireland were at that time like the chorus in the Greek tragedy, and took that part in the household drama to which their sympathy and fidelity then entitled them.
Molly made her way with my mother by amusing her, and contrived, as is always the case, to introduce divers members of her family as “followers.” One of these, and the only man servant in our establishment, gave himself the title of “James the Butler,” and both Molly and he had been some time in my mother’s service when she discovered that both were Catholics!!
As they had neither revealed nor concealed the circumstance, my mother dropped into their indifference, and accepted their good works without reference to their false faith.
In Celtic nations, clanship supersedes all other affections. Friendship sits lightly, and love more lightly, for both are generally the result of impulse; in Irish, “to fancy” means to love:
“All my fancy is for Nancy—hark, sweet tally
ho!” |
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| MY FATHER. | 65 |
After a friendship and intimacy of some years, my father and Mr. Daly broke off in a violent and sudden fit of temper and petulance. As there is no interest in such details, it is sufficient to say that he and Mr. Daly dissolved their partnership, and “all the counsel that they two had shared,” was broken up for ever.
My father erected his flag before that time-honoured monument of past pleasures, the old Music Hall of Fish Shamble Street.
He flew to Mr. Byrne of Cabantely, one of the greatest proprietors and finest Irish gentlemen of the day, whose property the Music Hall was. My father had known him in London, both at Mr. Blake’s and at Lord Clare’s. Mr. Byrne endeavoured to dissuade him from his mistaken speculation; but persuasion has no hold over passion, and my father took a lease for ninety-nine years, with a pepper-corn fine, of a fabric that looked as if it would not last a month.
Here he hoped to realise the dream of his life, the restoration of the drama to its pristine importance and intent, in moral and social influence, as Mr. Sheridan, his eminent predecessor in theatrical management, had hoped yet failed to do some years before. One of my father’s maxims was, that civilization would best be promoted by erecting theatres, like Martello-towers, at regular intervals over the land for the protection and instruction of the national mind:
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“To hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature; to shew virtue her own feature; scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”
At a moment when Irish nationality was rising above the level of unavailing complaint; when Irishmen hawked their grievances as beggars hawk their sores; when the glorious body of Irish volunteers became the Prætorian bands of the land, not to impose, but to break her chains; my father snatched the epithet, and gave his theatre the name of “National.” He was backed by some of the best men of the time; patriots, in the best sense of the word; and he set about his theatrical reformation with all the zeal and all the indiscretion of a true Irishman.
His family then consisted of his wife and two little girls, Sydney and Olivia, the elder under five years*
My poor distracted mother gladly took refuge in her pretty country house at Drumcondra, leaving my father, “like Nature in her great works—alone.”
She took the opportunity also of visiting her Wesleyan friend at Portarlington, in the hope of prevailing on Madame Terson, the head of the great French Huguenot school, to take the elder of her little girls, whose susceptibility of impression made her mother fearful of the influence of priests and players—those bêtes noires of her life. Madame Terson refused the infant pupil, as too young and too lively for her sober establishment, but promised to receive her when she should have attained her ninth year—a pro-
* The reader must exercise his own discretion as to dates.—Ed. |
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Our maid Molly of course accompanied us to Drumcondra. These Irish servants of the family were a race by themselves.
Familiar as the Mascarilles, the Scapios, the Lisettes, and the Dorines of the French stage,—sometimes as witty, and always as humorous,—they frequently made a claim to participate in the affairs of the family, because they believed themselves related to the family. Dropping the “O” or the “Mac,” which signified the chieftain of the sect, Pat Kavanagh could prove himself descended from the Kavanaghs, kings of Leinster; Thady Connor came lineally, “and that not fifty years ago,” from O’Connor, king of all Ireland; and Dennis Brian, “if every one had their right,” was the “ra’al O’Brian, prince of Thomond.”
On the passing of the Emancipation Bill, several Catholic gentlemen who had dropped the suspicious cognomen, resumed it, without fear of being suspected to have any intention to resume the estates or principalities along with them. A Catholic friend of ours, dining with us one day, was addressed as usual, and asked to take fish; he moodily replied: “I’ll trouble you for the vowel bit, if you please!”
If there is any merit in my delineation of Mac Rory, in O’Donnel, I owe it to the photographic impressions of some of the models in my own little domestic establishment who unconsciously sat to me.
The pride they take in their own country, even in
* See letter in the appendix from Pat Butler to Lord Ormond’s agent. |
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My husband and myself having received the honour of a command to dine with their Majesties of Belgium, at the palace at Brussels, I was followed to the antechamber by my Irish footman, Pat Grant (who figures in my novel of the Princess as Denis Fagan) to receive orders. I said as I was taking off my cloak, “This is a noble palace, Grant;” he answered with a look full of reproach and contempt, “Well, then, I wondher to hear your ladyship say that—you that has been at the Castle of Dublin.”
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